For Serbia itself, the republic that Mr Milosevic so brutally and ineffectually sought to aggrandise in four Balkan wars, the trial will, with luck, help to provide a more accurate account of recent history than the Serbia-as-victim version that Serbs still tend to believe.

ECONOMIST: Slobodan Milosevic

Its bombing campaign may be one of the most precise and careful in history, in stark contrast to Serbia's murderous campaign against Albanian civilians in Kosovo.

ECONOMIST: The law and the war

The difficulty for Serbia, as shown by Pejovic's testimony, is that it has a history of racism not just at club level but also at international level, which Milosevic acknowledged, though he insisted that the problem "is no more than in other European countries".

CNN: Racism row shines light on Serbian football